Voxel Quest (VQ) is a project currently being developed by one person (me) and of course various input from other developers and the VQ community. VQ is both an open source game engine and a game. I am developing a simpler game built around the engine in the short term, and (circumstances willing) a more ambitious RPG in the long run.

The long term vision:

The long term vision is to make a complete role playing game. In the short term, it will be fairly simplified with a focus more on combat than anything else. It is early, and the game is still largely taking shape - you can help determine my design choices by giving your input in the forums on this website. It is an ambitious project that is attempting to tackle many problems which previous games have failed to address successfully. In spite of prior failures, I think someone will tackle these problems eventually, even if not me. Still, we all must start somewhere if there is to be any innovation.

The primary problem that I am addressing is the so-called "Holy Grail" of game design - creating a living, interactive world that functions as you would expect, without events pre-scripted by a human. This means that every action you take has a real, sensible, and permanent consequence. NPCs in the world respond to your actions appropriately, but more importantly, they have their own goals and run their own lives regardless of your existence (rather than, say, sitting around waiting to give you a quest). This might sound like a pipe-dream, but I am attempting to address it on a fairly crude level initially, and rather than blindly entering this field, I actually have a long history of working with AI and I know what is and is not possible. You can read about how I am tackling some of these problems in the forums, it is far too much to write here.

That said, I am taking things one step at a time and my first goal is to get a minimally viable game out that is at least somewhat fun to play. I very may well not achieve everything, but so long as I can support myself I will continue to add whatever features I can. If it is not fun at first, help me shape it into something better. :)

Potential features, fate willing:

(Note: some of these features are now out of date - please consult the forums for current design choices)

You can now find a preliminary draft of the design document here (many areas still in progress or out of date).

A dynamic, persistent world with few constraints on construction/destruction.

A fully functional ecosystem, government, economy, etc.

A fully abstracted, procedurally generated world that is designed to be easy for AI to comprehend.

AI / NPCs that can interact and respond with any of the systems in the world, each with their own motivations and behaviors.

Emergent stories/plots/quests. The world is a complex set of systems that interacts to create the most convincing interactive storyline possible. No story trees, no prefabricated stories -- everything is created by circumstance.

It is single player, for now. No plans for a MMOG, but possibly LAN play if I have sufficient resources.

It is fantasy-based (Tolkienesque, like Warcraft or AD&D), nothing very original here. I want players to be immediately familiar with the game's universe.

Combat is turn based, for now, although the system may eventually be able to seamlessly toggle realtime play on and off. Heavy emphasis on tactics.

The game will probably be very challenging, but not unfair. You will die...a lot. Death will be permanent although there may be some way to salvage progress -- i.e. finding your previous avatar's dead body, reproduction, moving your spirit from one body to the next, leaving wills, etc.

There will be no artificial constraints (although much of the world will be confined to certain abstractions so that the AI can easily process it). The AI can (and will) do everything that you can do, including pursuing artifacts, carrying out quests/tasks, etc.

It will utilize an interesting combination of gameplay systems for many aspects of the game, inspired loosely by collectible card games (like Magic the Gathering) and board games (like Settlers of Catan). However, I plan to make the game more approachable than the aforementioned games. Other games and series that have inspired me are Ultima (6 & 7), Dungeon Master (2), Fallout (1 & 2), Spelunky, and Heroes of Might and Magic (2).

With the exception of a few effects, every single entity in the game is rendered with voxels and is completely solid.

The AI will do more than try to kill you. AI has full emotional profile and temperament, and every character has their own set of motivations. NPCs will lie to you, betray you, fall in love with you, try to steal from you, defend you, and many other things. That might sound like a recipe for an overly-complicated pipe-dream but everything is abstracted in terms that is easy for a computer AI to comprehend (everything functions based on an expert system with a relatively simple core engine).

AI abilities include pathfinding, reconnaissance/knowledge gathering, deduction (propositional logic, queries, backwards chaining), planning, collaboration, and score maximization (where the highest score is represented by the most motivators with the fewest deterrents). The AI does not perform abstraction/recognition as the world is pre-generated and pre-abstracted with this in mind. I call this "explicit Gestaltism." As a rough example, the AI does not need to look at a group of trees and process it to determine it is a forest. The world is procedurally generated from the top down and the AI understands all higher-order relationships. So, the AI can easily understand that a room is part of a given building which is part of a given city, which is part of a given province, which is part of a given country. In other words, the AI has a built in understanding of the world on macroscopic and microscopic levels. At a high level, the AI functions in many ways like a strategy game / RTS AI. AI knowledge is often approximated as doing a realtime world-wide simulation is obviously way too computationally expensive. The AI can gather existing knowledge, but it does not use a learning system (i.e. a weighted neural network or other similar mechanism).